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We take it, then, that the Intellectual-Principle is the
authentic existences and contains them all- not as in a place but
as possessing itself and being one thing with this its content.
All are one there and yet are distinct: similarly the mind holds
many branches and items of knowledge simultaneously, yet none of
them merged into any other, each acting its own part at call
quite independently, every conception coming out from the inner
total and working singly. It is after this way, though in a
closer unity, that the Intellectual-Principle is all Being in one
total- and yet not in one, since each of these beings is a
distinct power which, however, the total Intellectual-Principle
includes as the species in a genus, as the parts in a whole. This
relation may be illustrated by the powers in seed; all lies
undistinguished in the unit, the formative ideas gathered as in
one kernel; yet in that unit there is eye-principle, and there is
hand-principle, each of which is revealed as a separate power by
its distinct material product. Thus each of the powers in the
seed is a Reason-Principle one and complete yet including all the
parts over which it presides: there will be something bodily, the
liquid, for example, carrying mere Matter; but the principle
itself is Idea and nothing else, idea identical with the
generative idea belonging to the lower soul, image of a higher.
This power is sometimes designated as Nature in the seed-life;
its origin is in the divine; and, outgoing from its priors as
light from fire, it converts and shapes the matter of things, not
by push and pull and the lever work of which we hear so much, but
by bestowal of the Ideas.
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